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Archive for February, 2013

Welcome to the progress update for the period 16 to 22 February 2013, which has proven to be a busy seven days: 16,371 words (including XML mark-up) have been transcribed this week.

5,096 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of 58 on this time last week. 4,834(94%) of these transcripts are complete and locked, up on 49 on last week’s total.

Overall: 56% of the 8,387 manuscripts currently uploaded to the website have been transcribed thus far.

Boxes 98 and 50 were the most heavily-transcribed this week.

Earlier this week, we uploaded some new material to transcribe: Box 107. This is a veritable smorgasbord of manuscripts, with subjects ranging from education to chemistry, the panopticon to the improvement of the harpsichord, and from capital punishment to Bentham’s cooking tips, recipes (seriously), and advice on keeping chickens. We hope that you will find something which interests you among all that!

Thank you, as ever, to everyone who has given their time and effort to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days. It remains greatly appreciated by us all.

Welcome to the progress update for the period 9 to 15 February 2013, issued on the occasion of what would have been Bentham’s 265th birthday (old style calendar). 11,418 words (including TEI markup) were transcribed during the last seven days.

5,038 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially-transcribed, which is an increase of seventeen on this time last week. 4,785 (94%) of the transcripts are complete and locked, up twenty-four on last week’s total.

The voting for the Digital Humanities Awards 2012, in which Transcribe Bentham was nominated for ‘Best digital humanities project for public audiences’, closes on Sunday 17 February, at midnight (GMT). Each category is full of terrific projects which deserve your attention.

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has participated in Transcribe Bentham during the past seven days. Your time remains greatly appreciated by us all.

We are delighted to say that the Bentham Project, along with UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities, is taking part in tranScriptorium, a project funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme in the ICT for Learning and Access to Cultural Resources challenge.

tranScriptorium intends to develop innovative, efficient and cost-effective solutions for the indexing, searching, and full transcription of manuscript images, using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology.

For our part, UCL will be providing expertise in manuscripts, transcription, digital humanities and crowdsourcing, and images and transcripts of Bentham manuscripts.

tranScriptorium promises to be an extremely exciting project, and one in which we are greatly looking forward to participating in. For more detail, please visit the project website, and keep up to date at the Facebook page, or follow @tranScriptorium on Twitter.

Welcome to the Transcribe Bentham progress update for the period 2 to 8 February 2013, during which our 5,000th manuscript was transcribed! A total of 12,210 words (including XML markup) were transcribed during the last seven days.

5,021 manuscripts have now been transcribed or partially transcribed, which is 28 up on last week’s total. 4,761 (94%) of these are complete and locked, an increase of 32 on this time last week.

Overall: 59% of the 8,387 manuscripts currently uploaded to the website have been transcribed thus far.

We were delighted to say that Transcribe Bentham has been nominated in the DH 2012 awards, in the ‘Best Digital Humanities Project for Public Audiences’ category, in what is an extremely strong field. You can view all of the nominees and cast your ballots on the voting page. Voting is open until midnight (GMT) on Sunday 17 February.

Thank you, as always, to everyone who has contributed to Transcribe Bentham during the last seven days, and to having worked on more than 5,000 manuscripts. We are greatly appreciated of all of your efforts.

We are delighted to say, that following the transcription of manuscript JB/098/037/002 (thanks to Jan Copes for this one), 5,000 often complex and difficult to decipher manuscripts have now been worked on by Transcribe Bentham volunteers. This is a truly magnificent achievement by Transcribe Bentham participants, who in two and-a-half years have transcribed an estimated 2.5 million words, including XML mark-up of their work and who, on average, transcribe more manuscripts each week than could be reasonably expected of a full-time member of staff.

Needless to say, everyone at Transcribe Bentham and the Bentham Project are hugely grateful to each person who has participated so far (an alphabetical list of whom follows at the end of this post). Our special thanks also go to our wonderful regular transcribers who routinely produce such high-quality work for the project. The work of current, present, and future volunteer transcribers will, we hope, also be greatly appreciated by anyone who comes to use UCL’s digital Bentham Papers repository, or future volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, endeavours to which these transcripts will contribute.